The variety and diversity of annuals make them a perfect choice for any area of your garden and landscape, and with their amazing array of colors, shapes and sizes, you can use these plants to produce just about any look you wish. The caveat is that a random collection of annuals can end up looking like the botanical equivalent of a Hawaiian shirt worn with plaid pants. To have a beautiful, colorful garden, you need to start with a plan based on a few simple design principles.
Annuals are not only unsurpassed in the range of colors they offer, but in the textures of their foliage.
Photo Credit: ©2000 Dolezal Publishing/Tim Butler
Your choice of color makes a dramatic difference in the appearance of your annual flower plantings.
Photo Credit: ©2000 Dolezal Publishing/John M. Rickard
Choose flower colors for your annuals using an artist’s color wheel. This simple tool shows complementary and primary colors, making it easy to pick pleasing combinations while still offering varied colors in beds and borders.
Photo Credit: ©2000 Dolezal Publishing/John M. Rickard
Warm-colors enliven a garden space – whether in a planting bed or on the patio.
Photo Credit: ©2000 Dolezal Publishing/John M. Rickard
Choosing tones from a third of the color palette – here yellow to red strawflowers – guarantees that your flower bed will have a pleasing array of blooms.
Photo Credit: ©2000 Dolezal Publishing/John M. Rickard
There are no ironclad edicts you must obey when designing your garden, but there are a handful of helpful guidelines you’ll probably find useful, whether you’re a beginning gardener or an experienced green thumb. These include creating basic color schemes, combining different shapes and textures, using plants for their foliage and picking annuals that complement nearby landscape and architectural features.
Of all these design concepts, color is probably the most popular, because it’s the first thing most of us notice when we look at a flower. It’s also the first aesthetic element to think about when you begin to design your annual garden. What you’re aiming for is a mix of hues that enhance one another, avoiding a haphazard collection of colors that compete for the spotlight. By planting your garden with an eye toward a pleasing colorful blend, you can be sure that your outdoor living space will be neither boring nor have that explosion-in-a-paint-factory effect. While there’s no right or wrong way to get the color combo you desire, there are some tried-and-true approaches that can help you come up with eye-catching combinations.
There are three basic strategies for planning a color scheme. Before you choose one, take a look at a color wheel, used by artists and designers to visualize the colors they use in their projects. This basic tool is just a circular arrangement of the rainbow spectrum. It’s anchored by the primary colors – red, yellow and blue – with the complementary colors found in between – orange, green and purple.
The simplest way to design your garden is to use plants that bloom in various shades and tints of a single hue. A second possibility is to select two or three colors that harmonize – meaning they’re next to each other on the color wheel. So for example, a warm combination of red, red-orange and orange will enliven a solid-green wall of shrubbery at the back of a yard, while a cool planting of violet, blue-violet and blue next to a deck or patio will lend serenity to the area. The most dynamic combination of all is based on a mix of complementary colors – those found across from each other on the color wheel: yellow and purple, orange and blue, red and green – or you can combine primary colors for the same effect.
Perhaps even more crucial than a compatible color combination is selecting flowers that have similar color intensities, or saturation. The idea is to avoid planting brilliant shades with pale ones. Soft yellow, for example, might be beautiful with baby blue, but a brazen stoplight-yellow would be unpleasantly conspicuous in an otherwise pastel planting. On the other hand, vivid shades of purple and crimson might be compatible, even though a glance at the color wheel would not seem to recommend such a combination. When you’re deciding how intense to make your color scheme, just keep in mind that less-saturated colors tend to fade from sight while bright ones attract the eye. In other words, don’t expect flaming-orange blossoms to hide the utility meter – they’ll only draw attention to it.
When deciding how to feature your favorite color in your garden, keep location and lighting conditions in mind. If you want to plant yellow flowers near the patio where you eat breakfast, pale-lemon tints will appear to best advantage in the morning light. On the other hand, soft (or pastel) colors become washed out in the bright light of noon, whereas such sunlight brings out the best in bold, warm colors. So for lunchtime viewing on the patio, consider anchoring a boldly colored planting using that intense stoplight-yellow flower.
A more saturated yellow also would be your best choice for a distant part of the yard, since warm, bright colors seem to stand out or advance in the landscape when used from afar. Because pale or cool colors appear to recede, use those for up-close viewing, otherwise they’ll be difficult to see from a distance.
Finally, to tone down a planting of high-voltage colors, you can soften it by adding some white-flowered plants. If you’re among those who like white all by itself, grow a whole bed of popular annuals like cosmos, petunias and dahlias. An all-white garden seems to glow – especially when viewed by moonlight!
Your choice of color makes a dramatic difference in the look of your outdoor living space. Paint your landscape with Mother Nature’s box of crayons – and unleash your creative talents to color your garden beautiful.
